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Is autism your special interest?

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WeirdMetronome
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08 Oct 2021, 5:46 am

autisticelders wrote:
I'm a little late to the party, but yes, I have taken up autism as a very intense interest, since I learned of my own diagnosis so late in life.

I search blogs, forums, pages, research constantly, trying to learn more and more about it.

I also want to share that info to help others like me find their own late autism diagnosis.

Learning about my autism even so late in my life has given me so much relief from past pain and sorrow, and so many self understandings and understanding of others that I simply did not know of before diagnosis.
It has been such a relief to find out all the struggles and pains of my sordid past were not "all my fault" and that autism was there working behind the scenes without anybody even suspecting it. Nobody knew back then!


Yeah I was exactly the same when I first learned that I was autistic. It was such a huge revelation and I devoured as much information as I could at the time. I would spend hours and hours reading articles and watching videos... analysing everything I had experienced and comparing it to all the new things I was learning.

It's not really a special interest as such for me anymore now, but I still really enjoy reading other peoples' experiences as it makes me feel less alone.



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08 Oct 2021, 6:57 am

Yes.

Its a large part of my work - which I also classify as a special interest.

I feel fortunate to be paid to be paid for this!


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08 Oct 2021, 9:37 am

I'd say it's mostly a former special interest, although former SpIn can easily turn into current SpIn at a moment's notice. Once I've developed an interest in a subject, it rarely entirely goes away.

I first developed an interest in autism around age 13-14ish (I'm 31 now). It was an offshoot of a SpIn in FASD prompted by a paper my Mom wrote for her law degree (she was discussing the ethics of locking up someone for being a pregnant addict). Initially, I thought it was just an interesting subject of no personal relevance, but when I found stuff by autistic people (as opposed to parents of autistic kids), I began to recognize my own traits, and gradually progressed from thinking I had traits that mirrored autism but with a different cause (PTSD), to thinking that I was on the broader autistic phenotype, to thinking that I was probably autistic, to getting my official diagnosis at age 15. I was very interested in autism and involved in the autistic rights community probably up until sometime in my early twenties, when my university education prompted SpIns in other psychology subjects that displaced autism as my primary focus. Besides, I was running out of new things to learn about autism, and getting frustrated with the slow progress of activism. Since then, I've had SpIns on topics overlapping with autism more so than on autism itself. But my current biggest SpIn is probably parenting, which was sparked by the realization that I really wanted to be a parent. And since I'm pregnant now, that interest is only intensifying.



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08 Oct 2021, 4:45 pm

No, it is just some useful information to take into account. It enables my special interests, but is not as interesting itself.



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11 Oct 2021, 3:55 pm

No, not at all.

I was diagnosed with AS when I was 13 and have accepted it as a part of my human essence.


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11 Oct 2021, 4:02 pm

The Autism Spectrum esp. High Functioning Autism (HFA) is one of my special interests.

From personal experiences with HFA, I naturally sense that dichotomy in reconciling impartial, objectives viewpoints of HFA with personal experiences - which are usually well.............personal-- that is anything but objective, and impartial.

Go figure!